[scrrr]

It seems like unique online-identities that belong to real people, just like Facebook offers them, seem to be the only way to prevent rating-spam.

Or are they?

What if "mechanical turks" continue to use their FB-account to do the same?

This makes any rating-system almost useless.

And since I will be publishing an Android-App soon: Wouldn't it be wise to hire people to rate it with 5 stars, say a few hundred times? It seems like my competition will do it.

[kkowalczyk]

A solution does exist: providers of mturk-like services could disallow such work items and enforce that (inci-meta-dentally they could use mturk itself to crowd-source spam identification on the cheap).

There is additional work for the service provider but it would seem to me that it does align with their self-interest at some level. I don't think Amazon really wants mturk to be associated with providing a spam work force.

I believe one of the things that CrowdFlower explicitly calls out as an advantage over mturk is quality control (although for this particular solution to work all crowd-sourcing providers would have to do it - in this particular case it takes only one bad provider to enable bad behavior.

As to your hopefully hypothetical question: a risk you're running is that Google will pull out your app from the store. I haven't heard a case with Google but I'm pretty sure apps were pulled from Apple's App Store for manipulating ratings, so the downside could be big (your hard work could amount to nothing).

[pavel_lishin]

> providers of mturk-like services could disallow such work items

Except for the one shady site that doesn't, and ends up raking in profits.

[rms]

Ethics are murky. Don't talk about things like this on public forums. Google's watchful AI is always with us and when it finds you it will crush you. In practice, why hire people to rate it 5 stars when you can pay 200 friends of your friends to download your app and rate it if they like it?